The present invention relates generally to information retrieval, and more particularly to a system, method, and apparatus for information retrieval using data objects.
Due to the widespread use of computers and computer technology, it has become necessary to search large amounts of information for the information that is relevant to a particular computer user. For example, a user often needs to search large databases, their personal computer files, or the information from the Internet, which may be stored on multiple databases. Many information retrieval methods fail to provide sufficient quality in the results. For example, large databases of documents such as the Internet contain many low quality documents or irrelevant documents. As a result, a search can return hundreds of irrelevant or useless documents. In order to improve the quality of the results, additional search terms or a review of many search results is required.
Existing search engines use a variety of techniques that attempt to present the most relevant documents to the user. For example, documents can be ranked according to variations of a standard vector space model. These variations could include rankings that depend on how recently a particular piece of information was updated, or how close the search terms are to the beginning of the information source, or how often the information is linked to by other sources of information, such as hyperlinks from other web pages. Although these strategies can provide a selection process, the results still have relatively low quality. These search strategies are also susceptible to “spamming” techniques that can be used to artificially increase the placement in a search result.
A number of other known searching methods are currently known. However, there is still a need for an information retrieval system, method and apparatus that addresses these and other shortcomings of known information retrieval methods.